Electronic Voting analysis by a CompSci prof
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There is a series of very interesting papers on voting theory, both on paper and electronically, written by a computer science professor and election commissioner. I recommend them highly:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/
In particular, I recommend the essay on Paper Ballots, that's the theoretical basis for the current electronic systems.
Oops, I misspoke. It will not kill QuickTime, it will kill QuickTime Streaming, which requires UDP ports to establish a connection. I currently use the Open Source Darwin Streaming Server, for streaming videos from my personal website. For you Apple bashers who whine that this isn't a bad thing, how would YOU feel if your favorite Open Source project was threatened by the political moves of a monopolistic foreign telco?
On the positive side, this should kill the Windows Messenger popup spams, which propagate over UDP ports. On the negative side, it will kill Quicktime, which needs UDP ports for negotiating a connection.
SOLOS has a full VT-100 terminal, this CPU was used daily on the FedWire banking system, it was used to transfer millions of dollars every week. Sometimes CPU power is irrelevant. I also used it to write assembly language programs for process control, running a variety of motors and measurement devices in a lab.
20 minutes? Bah. My old vintage 1975 Sol-20 boots SOLOS from ROM in under a second. I can install a new OS ROM in seconds, it is conveniently provided on a ROM cart that pops in and out of a slot in the back. I can load BASIC or ASM-80 from Cassette Tape in under 2 minutes. Yeah, yeah, before you mod this down, just think a sec, I'm only trying to show how ludicrous this "time to first boot" is, as a measure of an OS.
Umm.. Not really. Judge KK recently gained a bit of attention for her activities as head of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court. That's the secret court that supervises the DoJ and Atty Gen. Asscroft's shredding of civil rights. She nailed Asscroft to the wall for his lies and abuses. This is a woman that has already shown her willingness to stand up to the Atty General. Here's a typical story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?p agename= article&node=&contentId=A51220-2002Aug22¬Found= true
Once someone mentioned Nitikin's specialty is Control Theory, it all snaps into place. Yep, there are realworld applications here. I can almost grasp the networking and communications implications, the ability to deal with n-dimensional spaces as simpler topological states. Ah, if only I'd done that two more years of calculus class. But those applications have little to do with the proof itself, more the implications of the topological network system he uses. Now let us know when he wins the Clay Mathematics Prize, wow a megabuck, that's better than a Nobel.
I fail to see why this is such a big thing. Most production houses use MTOR, which is bundled with RenderMan Artist Tools. You still have to use Maya and Renderman. This is kind of like having a Ferrari that uses 130 Octane fuel, and you proclaim you've invented a new type of hose to get the fuel from the pump to the fuel tank. But it's still just a hose, and the Ferrari and the Fuel still do all the work.
You should check out the developer docs for Alias|Wavefront Maya, it is the most complex GUI I know of, and their hotmenus and marking menus are totally awesome (and patented so you can't use em, unfortunately). I think there's some docs in there on APIs for the menus and the overall design structure, but there's so much junk in there, I've forgotten. You should probably also go through past issues of the SIGGRAPH annuals, there is a ton of GUI discussion in there, albeit scattered around everywhere, sometimes buried in nonGUI-related articles.
Ignorant consumers are unlikely to percieve any performace [sic] improvements in models unless there is some underlying technology that gets a new name or a new version number.
You're living in the 1990s. The computer world has moved on considerably since DTP and Word Processing were the state-of-the-art. Today's "Ignorant consumers" are using extremely processor-intensive apps like iMovie, iTunes, etc. I just upgraded, and the "performace" [sic] improvement is very noticable.
That should be an acronym by now, shouldn't it? BDB=Been Done Before. Long ago, probably 10 years ago, I saw old-style "laserium" projections onto aerosols. They often do outdoor displays on lakes or rivers (usually in conjunction with fireworks) and they have barges with pumps that spray up big sheets of water. They project the laser light onto the water spray, it makes a nice white reflective screen that shimmers. It looks really cool.
This isn't anything new. NASA is Federally mandated to give technology back to the taxpayers that funded it. Technology Transfer programs existed almost from Day 1 at NASA. For example: http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/ http://n ctn.hq.nasa.gov/
Thanks for the attribution, that's what I was looking for. But I'm not so sure that what I heard was Clarke's Law. I think Asimov was spoofing Clarke's Law with one of his own. Hard to recall after all these years, that's why I'm tossing this out to the/. hive-mind.
This sounds like a good time to sort out an old (possibly apocryphal) quote I heard, it was allegedly attributed to Issac Asimov. He said something to the effect that "any time an expert says something is absolutely impossible, it is certain to happen, eventually. Any time an expert says something is possible, it will happen sooner than anyone expected." Now I'm sure I've mangled that, Asimov could spin a phrase much better than that. But it does sound like Asimov, an ironic skepticism against skeptics, disbelief in pundits, and a belief that we are most infallible when we claim things are impossible.
I'm no acoustic engineer, but it seems you'd have to do some calculations to make sure the resonant cavity matches up to the speaker. I don't see any evidence that he's done any calculations whatsoever. How would you go about determining the optimal size and shape of the cabinet? Or does it not matter on such low freqs?
Don't worry, you're not screwed, I think the dual 1Ghz will work out. The dualie is so powerful, I can't see how it more speed could possibly make much difference. The deal-maker for me was that my buddy bought a non-DDR dual 1Ghz machine for $3500 just a few months ago. This machine is in the right niche, both in price and performance..
Yeah, sure I can take my own picture, but not for a formal portrait with specific formatting requirements. And you just can NOT take your own picture right, even with a remote shutter release. You just can't capture the right facial expression, not even with a mirror. I could bore you with a long psych paper I read about how this works, but suffice to say, you just can't take your own picture if you give half a damn about how you look in the pic.
This reminds me of my old manager when I did computer sales, he was an old used car salesman and he would always say "it's ALWAYS a good time to buy a computer."
But he was full of crap. A good example was my PowerMac 8100/110. It $4500 (even at edu discount), it took 60 days to deliver the machine due to delays caused by some idiotic porny easter egg they found in the OS CDs and they had to master new CDs for ALL their stock. 2 weeks after delivery, they dropped the price $300. Mere weeks later, the machine was discontinued and replaced by far cheaper, faster models.
Another good example is my Powerbook G3/500, purchased 30 days before the G4/500 was released at the same price. But that one I don't regret, because I paid for the machine with the 30 days of work for one specific job.
So what you could do is just ask ME, and whenever I buy, that's the WRONG time to buy. FYI, I just bought a new dual-1Ghz machine.
As a Fine Art photographer, this situation doesn't affect me much, since my prints are made with antique processes and nobody would ever consider a digital reproduction as anywhere close to the quality of my original prints. But occasionally I do run into a complete idiot photog. I recently had to have a portrait done for a Japanese resume, which is not much more than a passport photo. Wwhen I told the photog the picture would be republished in a book of resumes, he said that was prohibited, he would not allow reproduction rights without an extra fee. I told him I would use a different photographer. Oh if only I could take my OWN picture.
My sister used to go to Guatemala and El Salvador in the summers, and work with the local women setting up weaving cooperatives. From watching her over the years, I can personally assure you that it is completely unnecesary to use computers to sell products to the advanced nations. It DOES take trucks, ships, roads, etc. Computers are the wrong end of the infrastructure to develop.
I have some alternative suggestions for low-power, easily self-manufactured products that will be appropriate for this project. For the most common needs, users will be satisfied by the Portable Engineering, Numeric Computation, & Illustration Recorder, and the storage medium referred to as the Portable Accumulative Permanent Encoding Recorder. The P.E.N.C.I.L and P.A.P.E.R. system requires no power to operate and can be manufactured in any low-tech country with local materials. This story reminds me of what happened when someone first tried to bring the internet to Nepal. They tried to find a local English-speaker for a contact person, they could only find one or two, and they were not interested in the project. They said they were far too busy working with foreign countries that were helping install sewers and electricity. All this project is going to do is make poor countries even poorer. They can make all the pedal-power systems they want, but still have to buy computer hardware from abroad, using hard currency. I urge people to stop and think about whether this computer stuff is what third-world countries really NEED. Maybe someone should ASK them what they need, instead of suggesting projects based on what WE think they should need. I betcha they'd ask for things like Vitamin A tablets and refrigerators and AM radios.
That was a pretty poor review, if all you can say about Murakami is that his books weren't what you expected, they weren't full of stereotypical Japanese doing kendo. Don't you have any opinions on the content?
The reason Murakami is compared to PKD is that he uses the most mundane of language or situations, with a slightly shifted psychological circumstance, perhaps even apocalyptic conditions. So for example, in a Dickian twist, Murakami's "TV People" describes how one day some people come to his home to deliver a TV, they're perfectly regular in every sense but one, they're only 3/4 scale people.
I've read a lot of Murakami in the original Japanese, and it's a very interesting experience. Many writers use complex language forms but Murakami is relatively plain, it is hard to describe the subtle monotony and relentlessness of his plain language. Probably his most startling work was "Underground" which is just now available in English for the first time. It's the book where he writes the least, the book mostly transcripts of interviews with victims of the Aum Shinrikyo poison gas attack in 1995. But between the interviews is Murakami's reconstruction of the events, and essays about Japan's society and how Aum could have happened right in front of everyone's eyes.
And here's where Murakami sort of goes off the deep end. I've read a few of M's essays lately, he has taken on the role of social critic. His essays focus on "ishiki no arikata" which is loosely translated, "the way people are supposed to think about things." He made some particularly hilarious remarks denouncing recent fashion trends like "yamamba" and "ganguro" as unJapanese and would lead to the moral corruption of the nation. He sounds like he's becoming an old fart, cranking about what's gone wrong with those darn kids today. My opinion was confirmed after I read a couple of his travel books. They're all full of gripes like "I hiked around Malta, the food was greasy and the toilets were dirty. I had to have fresh sushi sent by DHL from Tokyo once a week or I'd have nothing decent to eat."
Okay-- you keep using the word 'kaizen', but you don't even bother to translate it into English-- me thinks you may not even know the translation "improvement".
Kaizen does not just mean "improvement," although most dictionaries only have that simple definition. Kaizen is a process of continuous incremental refinement. It incorporates many similar philosophies, such as Drucker's Quality Circles. Kaizen is widely enough known as a philosophy, many books have been written on this subject, so it is common to use just the term kaizen instead of getting into all this stuff.
Kaizen has nothing to do with fundamental innovation, as has been commented by you and others. Kaizen is merely a system of putting those innovations into the market. The best example I can think of is GPSS. The US put up the satellites, but consumer GPSS devices appeared in Japan long before the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a series of very interesting papers on voting theory, both on paper and electronically, written by a computer science professor and election commissioner. I recommend them highly:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/
In particular, I recommend the essay on Paper Ballots, that's the theoretical basis for the current electronic systems.
Oops, I misspoke. It will not kill QuickTime, it will kill QuickTime Streaming, which requires UDP ports to establish a connection. I currently use the Open Source Darwin Streaming Server, for streaming videos from my personal website. For you Apple bashers who whine that this isn't a bad thing, how would YOU feel if your favorite Open Source project was threatened by the political moves of a monopolistic foreign telco?
On the positive side, this should kill the Windows Messenger popup spams, which propagate over UDP ports.
On the negative side, it will kill Quicktime, which needs UDP ports for negotiating a connection.
SOLOS has a full VT-100 terminal, this CPU was used daily on the FedWire banking system, it was used to transfer millions of dollars every week. Sometimes CPU power is irrelevant. I also used it to write assembly language programs for process control, running a variety of motors and measurement devices in a lab.
20 minutes? Bah. My old vintage 1975 Sol-20 boots SOLOS from ROM in under a second. I can install a new OS ROM in seconds, it is conveniently provided on a ROM cart that pops in and out of a slot in the back. I can load BASIC or ASM-80 from Cassette Tape in under 2 minutes.
Yeah, yeah, before you mod this down, just think a sec, I'm only trying to show how ludicrous this "time to first boot" is, as a measure of an OS.
Umm.. Not really. Judge KK recently gained a bit of attention for her activities as head of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court. That's the secret court that supervises the DoJ and Atty Gen. Asscroft's shredding of civil rights. She nailed Asscroft to the wall for his lies and abuses. This is a woman that has already shown her willingness to stand up to the Atty General. Here's a typical story:p agename= article&node=&contentId=A51220-2002Aug22¬Found= true
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?
Once someone mentioned Nitikin's specialty is Control Theory, it all snaps into place. Yep, there are realworld applications here. I can almost grasp the networking and communications implications, the ability to deal with n-dimensional spaces as simpler topological states. Ah, if only I'd done that two more years of calculus class. But those applications have little to do with the proof itself, more the implications of the topological network system he uses.
Now let us know when he wins the Clay Mathematics Prize, wow a megabuck, that's better than a Nobel.
I fail to see why this is such a big thing. Most production houses use MTOR, which is bundled with RenderMan Artist Tools. You still have to use Maya and Renderman. This is kind of like having a Ferrari that uses 130 Octane fuel, and you proclaim you've invented a new type of hose to get the fuel from the pump to the fuel tank. But it's still just a hose, and the Ferrari and the Fuel still do all the work.
You should check out the developer docs for Alias|Wavefront Maya, it is the most complex GUI I know of, and their hotmenus and marking menus are totally awesome (and patented so you can't use em, unfortunately). I think there's some docs in there on APIs for the menus and the overall design structure, but there's so much junk in there, I've forgotten.
You should probably also go through past issues of the SIGGRAPH annuals, there is a ton of GUI discussion in there, albeit scattered around everywhere, sometimes buried in nonGUI-related articles.
You're living in the 1990s. The computer world has moved on considerably since DTP and Word Processing were the state-of-the-art. Today's "Ignorant consumers" are using extremely processor-intensive apps like iMovie, iTunes, etc. I just upgraded, and the "performace" [sic] improvement is very noticable.
That should be an acronym by now, shouldn't it? BDB=Been Done Before.
Long ago, probably 10 years ago, I saw old-style "laserium" projections onto aerosols. They often do outdoor displays on lakes or rivers (usually in conjunction with fireworks) and they have barges with pumps that spray up big sheets of water. They project the laser light onto the water spray, it makes a nice white reflective screen that shimmers. It looks really cool.
This isn't anything new. NASA is Federally mandated to give technology back to the taxpayers that funded it. Technology Transfer programs existed almost from Day 1 at NASA. For example:n ctn.hq.nasa.gov/
http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/
http://
Thanks for the attribution, that's what I was looking for. But I'm not so sure that what I heard was Clarke's Law. I think Asimov was spoofing Clarke's Law with one of his own. Hard to recall after all these years, that's why I'm tossing this out to the /. hive-mind.
This sounds like a good time to sort out an old (possibly apocryphal) quote I heard, it was allegedly attributed to Issac Asimov. He said something to the effect that "any time an expert says something is absolutely impossible, it is certain to happen, eventually. Any time an expert says something is possible, it will happen sooner than anyone expected."
Now I'm sure I've mangled that, Asimov could spin a phrase much better than that. But it does sound like Asimov, an ironic skepticism against skeptics, disbelief in pundits, and a belief that we are most infallible when we claim things are impossible.
I'm no acoustic engineer, but it seems you'd have to do some calculations to make sure the resonant cavity matches up to the speaker. I don't see any evidence that he's done any calculations whatsoever. How would you go about determining the optimal size and shape of the cabinet? Or does it not matter on such low freqs?
That's precisely what I said, and someone modded it as a troll.
No excuses needed, I love Bill Brandt.
Don't worry, you're not screwed, I think the dual 1Ghz will work out. The dualie is so powerful, I can't see how it more speed could possibly make much difference. The deal-maker for me was that my buddy bought a non-DDR dual 1Ghz machine for $3500 just a few months ago. This machine is in the right niche, both in price and performance..
Yeah, sure I can take my own picture, but not for a formal portrait with specific formatting requirements. And you just can NOT take your own picture right, even with a remote shutter release. You just can't capture the right facial expression, not even with a mirror. I could bore you with a long psych paper I read about how this works, but suffice to say, you just can't take your own picture if you give half a damn about how you look in the pic.
This reminds me of my old manager when I did computer sales, he was an old used car salesman and he would always say "it's ALWAYS a good time to buy a computer."
But he was full of crap. A good example was my PowerMac 8100/110. It $4500 (even at edu discount), it took 60 days to deliver the machine due to delays caused by some idiotic porny easter egg they found in the OS CDs and they had to master new CDs for ALL their stock. 2 weeks after delivery, they dropped the price $300. Mere weeks later, the machine was discontinued and replaced by far cheaper, faster models.
Another good example is my Powerbook G3/500, purchased 30 days before the G4/500 was released at the same price. But that one I don't regret, because I paid for the machine with the 30 days of work for one specific job.
So what you could do is just ask ME, and whenever I buy, that's the WRONG time to buy. FYI, I just bought a new dual-1Ghz machine.
As a Fine Art photographer, this situation doesn't affect me much, since my prints are made with antique processes and nobody would ever consider a digital reproduction as anywhere close to the quality of my original prints. But occasionally I do run into a complete idiot photog. I recently had to have a portrait done for a Japanese resume, which is not much more than a passport photo. Wwhen I told the photog the picture would be republished in a book of resumes, he said that was prohibited, he would not allow reproduction rights without an extra fee. I told him I would use a different photographer. Oh if only I could take my OWN picture.
My sister used to go to Guatemala and El Salvador in the summers, and work with the local women setting up weaving cooperatives. From watching her over the years, I can personally assure you that it is completely unnecesary to use computers to sell products to the advanced nations. It DOES take trucks, ships, roads, etc. Computers are the wrong end of the infrastructure to develop.
I have some alternative suggestions for low-power, easily self-manufactured products that will be appropriate for this project. For the most common needs, users will be satisfied by the Portable Engineering, Numeric Computation, & Illustration Recorder, and the storage medium referred to as the Portable Accumulative Permanent Encoding Recorder. The P.E.N.C.I.L and P.A.P.E.R. system requires no power to operate and can be manufactured in any low-tech country with local materials.
This story reminds me of what happened when someone first tried to bring the internet to Nepal. They tried to find a local English-speaker for a contact person, they could only find one or two, and they were not interested in the project. They said they were far too busy working with foreign countries that were helping install sewers and electricity.
All this project is going to do is make poor countries even poorer. They can make all the pedal-power systems they want, but still have to buy computer hardware from abroad, using hard currency. I urge people to stop and think about whether this computer stuff is what third-world countries really NEED. Maybe someone should ASK them what they need, instead of suggesting projects based on what WE think they should need. I betcha they'd ask for things like Vitamin A tablets and refrigerators and AM radios.
That was a pretty poor review, if all you can say about Murakami is that his books weren't what you expected, they weren't full of stereotypical Japanese doing kendo. Don't you have any opinions on the content?
The reason Murakami is compared to PKD is that he uses the most mundane of language or situations, with a slightly shifted psychological circumstance, perhaps even apocalyptic conditions. So for example, in a Dickian twist, Murakami's "TV People" describes how one day some people come to his home to deliver a TV, they're perfectly regular in every sense but one, they're only 3/4 scale people.
I've read a lot of Murakami in the original Japanese, and it's a very interesting experience. Many writers use complex language forms but Murakami is relatively plain, it is hard to describe the subtle monotony and relentlessness of his plain language. Probably his most startling work was "Underground" which is just now available in English for the first time. It's the book where he writes the least, the book mostly transcripts of interviews with victims of the Aum Shinrikyo poison gas attack in 1995. But between the interviews is Murakami's reconstruction of the events, and essays about Japan's society and how Aum could have happened right in front of everyone's eyes.
And here's where Murakami sort of goes off the deep end. I've read a few of M's essays lately, he has taken on the role of social critic. His essays focus on "ishiki no arikata" which is loosely translated, "the way people are supposed to think about things." He made some particularly hilarious remarks denouncing recent fashion trends like "yamamba" and "ganguro" as unJapanese and would lead to the moral corruption of the nation. He sounds like he's becoming an old fart, cranking about what's gone wrong with those darn kids today. My opinion was confirmed after I read a couple of his travel books. They're all full of gripes like "I hiked around Malta, the food was greasy and the toilets were dirty. I had to have fresh sushi sent by DHL from Tokyo once a week or I'd have nothing decent to eat."
Kaizen does not just mean "improvement," although most dictionaries only have that simple definition. Kaizen is a process of continuous incremental refinement. It incorporates many similar philosophies, such as Drucker's Quality Circles. Kaizen is widely enough known as a philosophy, many books have been written on this subject, so it is common to use just the term kaizen instead of getting into all this stuff.
Kaizen has nothing to do with fundamental innovation, as has been commented by you and others. Kaizen is merely a system of putting those innovations into the market. The best example I can think of is GPSS. The US put up the satellites, but consumer GPSS devices appeared in Japan long before the USA.